https://anildash.com/http://www.anildash.com/http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/fb_pwrd.gifAnil DashGhost 2.9Thu, 23 May 2019 11:04:49 GMT6040.727093-73.978644http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/AnilDashhttps://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with The Free DictionarySubscribe with Bitty BrowserSubscribe with Live.comSubscribe with Excite MIXSubscribe with WebwagSubscribe with Podcast ReadySubscribe with WikioSubscribe with Daily RotationThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site.Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where the little company behind this little device comes from, it might be hard to understand why this isn't just another random gadget like you might see]]>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/buP-XMth2kw/5ce613a36d102b00a6babab7Thu, 23 May 2019 03:53:08 GMT

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where the little company behind this little device comes from, it might be hard to understand why this isn't just another random gadget like you might see on a crowdfunding site.

An Indie Scene

About 20 years ago, there was a bit of a reckoning about what the web was going to be. The dot com era of startups were in full bloom (the crash didn't come until 2000, with 9/11 cementing the collapse of the first web bubble) but those of us who loved the internet could sense some of the joy and creativity seeping out of it as the money men took over.

A little less obvious was the reckoning going on amongst "software people". We were still making programs then, or software — applications wouldn't get shortened to "apps" until the iPhone took off almost a decade later. But there was a culture that almost saw making software as a craft. And a number of new web-savvy companies sprung up at the forefront of that movement, all of them decidedly not interested in just riding the dot com wave that was about to crash. I was a fan of them all, watching from afar as they seemed to set the standards for what was "cool" in tech — and all of them did it from outside of Silicon Valley.

Basically, in tech there was something akin to an independent music scene that one might see in a mid-sized town. Except it was geographically dispersed rather than being in one city, and it was about creating technology instead of creating songs.

In Chicago, there was 37 Signals. Brash, bold, opinionated, and trendsetting in design, the company evolved over time into today's Basecamp, still one of the most popular project management tools. (And they spun out lots of interesting tech and tools along the way.) In New York City, we had Fog Creek Software. It, too, had opinionated and charismatic leaders talking pointedly about The Right Way to make software, and it changed immensely over the years, spinning out efforts like Trello and Stack Overflow, before finally evolving into Glitch, where I work now.

And then, in Portland, there was Panic. They began with the venerable and utilitarian FTP app, Transmit, but released a wide variety of tools for developers, before transforming themselves in recent years into a broader, more ambitious software publisher that put out mainstream hits like Firewatch. But where these other standard-bearer companies were brash and in-your-face, Panic was always a little, well... goofy. Friendly, to be sure. And smart as hell. But there was a sense of exploration and fun and play to everything Panic did.

And today, we got to see one of the most exciting announcements in the two-decade history of the company: Playdate. You can read up on all the details elsewhere, but suffice to say, this little game machine looks like one of the most fun and joyful new efforts that any company has done recently, and that a tiny indie software company in Oregon has the ambition to even attempt such a thing makes it only more endearing.

Perhaps the best way of explaining why Panic is so important to so many of us is to watch Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser's wonderful, heartfelt talk at the XOXO Festival back in 2013. (It even teases the existence of Firewatch, long before it became a smash hit!)

Cabel Sasser, Panic

Cabel's closing exhortation to "don't waste this, keep everyone guessing, and make me proud" hit me hard in the room at that moment, and stuck with me to this day. Because Panic has done exactly that.

Date of Arrival

I'd been given a hint a while ago that something like this was coming, but the final execution is even more delightful than I'd imagined it might be. (That crank!) More importantly, it's captured the imagination of so many, and seems like the kind of thing that could inspire a new generation of creative people to think, "Hey, maybe good tech is something we can make ourselves." I've seen it happen on Glitch, and now I see it happening around Playdate after just a few hours.

That idea, that maybe things like our gaming devices or the websites we visit should be created by people we know and like, instead of giant faceless companies, seems more essential than ever. We would never settle for replacing all of our made-with-love, locally-grown, mom's recipe home cooking with factory-farmed fast food, even if sometimes convenience demands we consume the latter. And we shouldn't compromise any less on making sure that some of the time we spend playing games with each other, and delighting in the promise of technology, comes from people who've been diligently working for years to make well-sourced, organically grown, made-with-love technology.

I don't know if Playdate will succeed in the market. I don't know what kind of risk it represents for Panic as a company. But I know that people see this cute little device, and are reminded that they used to get excited when they saw cool new technology, instead of wondering how it would warp their reality, or steal their information. Here's hoping for a return to tech that's fun, that's thoughtful, and that's created with a little bit of soul.

]]>https://anildash.com/2019/05/22/putting-the-soul-in-console/About seven years ago, inspired by Caterina Fake's seminal essay about fear of missing out, I wrote a bit about the Joy of Missing Out, and for a little while, JOMO became a thing.

It showed up in those "100 trends to watch this year" roundups that come out at the start of every new year, percolated through think pieces over the next year or two, and eventually ended up a staple of the lifestyle influencers who talk about wellness. I think a few of them even wrote books about it, though they leaned a little more toward the script-font-and-mason-jar side of things, where I'm not very credible.

For me, the most delightful outcome was Jenna Wortham's 2012 essay in the New York Times, talking about FOMO and JOMO, but also mentioning my son and his proclivity for dancing; given that his birth was what had prompted me to reflect on JOMO in the first place, it seemed eminently appropriate.

Influencergrams

Presently, the social web is abuzz with people revisiting the ill-fated Fyre Festival. Two different documentaries have come out offering a perspective on the magnificent scams that surrounded the festival, and conversation focuses on that grift as well as the various ethical compromises and lapses of the documentary filmmakers.

But I'm struck by how one primary reason a fiasco like Fyre Festival could happen, or indeed how many of the worst aspects of influencer culture can happen, is because of the very real emotional effect of the Fear of Missing Out. It's especially true because FOMO is a designed, intentional result of using most modern social media apps.

It's been largely overlooked that FOMO was coined by Caterina Fake, a cofounder of Flickr — one of the very first people who ever helped create a large-scale social network for photo sharing. Her comments on FOMO came less than 6 months after Instagram launched. Though of course both services seemed superficially similar because they were social networks built around photos, Instagram's social design was almost always with the opposite intent of Flickr's social goals. It was almost as if Instagram was designed to optimize for FOMO. But check out what Caterina said in 2011:

Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction. Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. [S]ocial software both creates and cures FOMO.

[There's a quaint habit that some of us old-timers still have where we call the technology behind social networks "social software".]

In Joy

Years have passed, and now FOMO (and to a lesser extent, JOMO) are just part of culture. I was walking through the Union Square subway stop not too long ago, and saw this Spotify ad, huge and unmissable.

And the broader principles of intentionality around consumption are an even bigger phenomenon. Marie Kondo is quickly graduating from being the author of a book that became a phenomenon into being a full-fledged global media tycoon. It's only a matter of time until she has a deal with a retailer to sell branded Konmari boxes for you to store your things in. (Maybe one of them will be a lead box that you can put your phone in so you don't look at it?) But interestingly, the fundamental framing of her entire approach to improving your life is to start with what brings you joy. That make a hell of a lot of sense.

The stakes are so much higher now then back when we just worried that social media would make us feel bad about missing a party. Yes, that's still a cause of stress, but far worse is social media enabling grifters to profiteer off of innocent people's credulity. How can we fret about missing our friends when the emotional manipulation of social apps has warped every institution in our entire culture?

Ultimately, though, this began as a conversation centered around joy. Isn't that a rare, and special, and fragile thing? How often do we talk about joy, let alone actively pursuing it or protecting it? I think pursuing joy, protecting peaceful moments, seeing our friends' happiness as a cause for celebration and not envy, and engaging with our lives on our own terms are quietly radical acts.

It is a brave and meaningful thing to talk earnestly about joy at a time when so many aspire to, and delight in, destroying it.

But yeah, obviously, I should have written a book about JOMO and become the "guru of JOMO". I'd probably be able to have my own private island with a music festival by now.

]]>https://anildash.com/2019/01/20/i-should-have-written-a-jomo-book/With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her evolution, and unique place in culture, can be summed]]>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/-3gl0gU4KTM/5b50e5acfb86c900541c19ecThu, 03 Jan 2019 15:29:05 GMT

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her evolution, and unique place in culture, can be summed up with just one verse.

There's a brief, melancholy moment on Janet's 2015 album Unbreakable that shocked me when I first heard it, and has haunted me ever since for its accuracy and prescience. It comes in "Shoulda Known Better", a dance song that's a standout on Unbreakable, with fairly conventional pop production paired with a very unusual structure that alternates between a pulsing, even euphoric chorus and subdued, nearly heartbroken verses. It's not the loud-soft that every Pixies-referencing rock band trots out, but rather a striking grafting of two completely different moods into a single pop song. The overall sentiment of the song is conveyed by the jarring juxtaposition of cataloguing social ills (the kind that Janet has been discussing since Rhythm Nation) against an insistence that directly reckoning with such injustices can still help to fix them.

What Janet said made me rethink how pop music talks about narratives of race, and how it deploys hope and optimism or falls back to resignation or despair.

I had this great epiphany
And rhythm nation was the dream
I guess next time I'll know better

Janet's Unbreakable album has been unfairly overlooked, perhaps because she couldn't do a full-on promotional push at the time of its launch as she was going through a complicated pregnancy and a lot of change in her personal life. But as an album, it stands tall amongst the other formidable standouts in her catalog, and is perhaps her best complete album since 1998's Velvet Rope. "Shoulda Known Better" shows exactly why it's her strongest release in years.

A Vision of Blindness

The pop music tradition, especially the global superstar tier of pop music where Janet resides, has had a fairly consistent narrative for a few decades now. Just as the rhythms and arrangements of contemporary pop music can often find its roots in the funk and disco of the 70s, the lyrical grounding of most "issue oriented" pop music was defined in the simple, sometimes reductive, utopianism of the 60s.

Motown struggled famously with reacting to the political moment it found itself in toward the late 60s and early 70s, with Berry Gordy fighting against Marvin Gaye's cultural commentary in What's Going On, only begrudgingly agreeing to release the now-classic record. But despite the success of Gaye's efforts (and even more pointed songs like some of Stevie Wonder's work later in the 70s), the template for much of pop music was set: talking about racial problems in America was still supposed to finish with a call for color-blind idealism. And it's important to remember that Motown wasn't some abstract representation of excellence in black music to the Jackson family; Motown was the mentors who came around the house as the Jackson kids were growing up. Especially for Janet, as the youngest of the family and the one most rooted in California instead of Indiana or Detroit, the example set by someone like Diana Ross would have been omnipresent.

This expectation of pop music's conversation about race persisted for decades. By the end of the 80s, Janet was pushing forward the boundaries of pop music with Rhythm Nation 1814, with many of its songs explicitly articulating a vision of color-blindness. Even its title track, an all-time classic, opens with a spoken incantation:

We are a nation with no geographic boundaries
Bound together through our beliefs
We are like-minded individuals
Sharing a common vision
Pushing toward a world rid of color lines

Within two years after the release of Rhythm Nation, Michael Jackson would release his single "Black or White", whose chorus repeatedly insists that it doesn't matter if you're black or white. The same year, Prince would release his album Diamonds and Pearls, whose bridge enthusiastically promises, "u will be colorblind". The biggest stars of the MTV era had weighed in, and they had found consensus in their lyrics.

Telling the Truth

But lets's fast-forward to just over a decade after the peak of the MTV era. Janet had been sidelined by the predator Les Moonves for her Super Bowl performance. Prince had abandoned his name, written "slave" on his face, returned to his name, and re-emerged outside the conventional record label system. Michael Jackson had gone to war against his record label, calling his label head "the devil". None of their work would ever blindly champion ignorance of race again; all of them would reckon directly with the fact that even their extraordinary talent and success didn't shield them from the structural injustices of the industry they had mastered.

But it took Janet explicitly revisiting her past work to really drive this home. Unlike almost any other major pop artist, Janet revisited her signature song, in a world of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and declared her past vision obsolete. In its place was an updated, more complicated vision.

Janet's vision of a post-Rhythm nation isn't a pessimistic one, though. Instead, it's a hard-earned lesson, an unpopular but necessary truth that takes courage to share. We can't solve problems that we can't talk about, and Janet had the wisdom to tell the truth of the problem, even if it meant challenging one of her best-known narratives.

Still, the first time I heard those lyrics in "Shoulda Known Better", it hit me like a gut punch. Part of it was the difference between hearing an idealistic message as a teen and hearing a tough, painful lesson as an adult. But more fundamentally, it was about recognizing the shortcomings and dangers of the colorblindness that we'd all been taught when I was young. Great art is supposed to challenge us, but it takes a truly great artist to give us permission to let go of our past. And Janet pushed us there.

I stil love the song "Rhythm Nation"; I always will. But I believe in Janet today. And just as with her Hall of Fame induction, the music industry may always lag behind, but it can never deny Janet's vision.

]]>https://anildash.com/2019/01/03/after-the-rhythm-nation/Prince was an astoundingly prolific artist, releasing nearly 40 albums under his own name(s), and thousands of songs for himself and others. His concerts were legendary, spellbinding from arenas to intimate clubs, flooring audiences around the world.

Prince was an astoundingly prolific artist, releasing nearly 40 albums under his own name(s), and thousands of songs for himself and others. His concerts were legendary, spellbinding from arenas to intimate clubs, flooring audiences around the world.

But videos? Prince was a lot more ambivalent about videos. He made dozens of them, some great, some... well, some were barely more than home videos he threw together with his friends or bandmates around Paisley Park.

It's in his videos, though that we see Prince's relationship with his music as a commercial artist. A few times, Prince really told a story or expanded on the narrative of a song using a video. In his performance-oriented videos, he was often mesmerizing, capturing much of what made Prince the best live pop musician of his era.

And importantly, it is in his videos that we see Prince exploring the edges of his identity and public persona. There are hints and clues of what Prince wanted to do next at almost every phase of his career. Frustratingly, though most of Prince's videos, including some of his very best, remained obscure, getting almost no airplay back when there were music video channels, or being distributed through one-off VHS video collections, CD-ROMs or uneven and short-lived video streams on Prince's websites. As a result, it's been almost impossible to evaluate Prince's videos as a whole body of work.

Until now. With the Prince estate's release of his entire video collection, in high resolution, some easily accessible for the first time ever, we get a different glimpse at Prince. While Prince's recorded albums seldom featured his absurd humor, his videos often gave free reign to Prince's sillier side. While many of his songs were solo productions where Prince (as his album credits so often proclaimed) produced, arranged, composed and performed the entire song, in his videos, he would often cast his bandmates, friends and proteges in roles where they would mime his work and represent facets of Prince himself. We even get to see Prince directing (or ghost-directing) a number of works, as he grew in ability and confidence as a director over the course of his career.

Now, the truth is, many of Prince's videos just aren't that great. Especially when considered in comparison to the sheer mind-boggling breadth of Prince's musical genius, or the groundbreaking video innovation of his pop contemporaries like Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Madonna, the fact that Prince has fewer truly extraordinary music videos is a stark contrast. But as with all things Prince, when he was doing his best, there was absolutely nobody better.

Here, then, is a look at all of Prince's music videos, in chronological order. There are 124 released during the 35 years of his pop career, and I've included the 2 estate-released videos as well. Many of these annotations on these videos began as an ongoing Twitter thread that I've been updating as the estate released new clips (Questlove said it was worthy of his NYU class!) but here I've updated and expanded all the information on each video, and covered the videos I omitted on Twitter, as well as a number which are not available on the streaming services, but which were released over the years.

I hope having the full library of Prince's videos available will help people appreciate the extraordinary breadth of his musical gift, and provide a new lens on not just how remarkably prolific he was, but how absolutely fearless Prince was in constantly exploring new aspects of his expression. Enjoy!

1979

I Wanna Be Your Lover

Prince's first incontrovertible hit, from his second, self-titled album, featured an incredible look that nobody else could pull off. The open-necked blouse, with Prince still young enough to be openly aping Mick Jagger's prancing, also served to let a lot of new fans know that the new act they'd fallen for was, in fact, an individual man — not a group.

Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad

The first time Prince ever appeared in a video fronting a band, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad is also the only appearance of early band member Gayle Chapman. The single dropped just as Prince was about to embark on his stint opening for Rick James on his 1980 tour, the biggest stage he'd yet commanded.

1980

Uptown

In the first video for his third album, Prince debuts a new look, an expanded band — including the first video appearance of Revolution stalwart Lisa Coleman on keys — and the stage set he'd use in that year's Dirty Mind tour. Also notable is one disappearance: pants. Prince is sporting bikini briefs, a dramatic way of introducing the coordinated looks he'd sport throughout the rest of his career, where the look on an album cover matched the looks on stage and the looks in his music videos.

Dirty Mind

Following on the heels of the Uptown single was this video for the title track of the Dirty Mind album. Filmed at the same time as the only other video of this era, the crowd stays excited throughout the clip, even as Prince shows off what must be his goofiest dance ever during the fade-out of the song, flailing his arm around while gripping his trench coat tight.

1981

Controversy

A huge upgrade in production values makes Controversy the turning point toward Prince's visual identity that launched him to superstardom in the 80s. There's a stained-glass window behind the set, just like on his hugely successful tour that year. The song itself is a thumping, all-time classic, and would remain a staple of his live sets for the rest of Prince's life. The band has nearly evolved into the Revolution with the addition of Mark Brown on the bass guitar, and Prince has his custom-tailored long trenchcoat with the studded epaulets already. The only thing missing? That slick custom coat is still colored black. A little splash of a signature color, and Prince was just about ready to show off the look he'd sport when he took over the world.

(There were a few signs that Prince's production team was still getting its act together in this pre-MTV era: check out the cameraman visible on stage left at 2:05.)

Sexuality

Prince at the peak of his No Pants Mode era, sporting his thigh-highs and briefs. At 2:30, Prince premiers his signature split, the move that would define his onstage presence during his greatest years of superstardom, and shape his life offstage long after he'd stopped doing that kind of dancing. But do stick around for the laser show at the end, as it evokes the lighting of Michael Jackson's Rock With You video from two years prior.

1982

1999

Now this is a superstar. Prince vaults into the stratosphere with the entire band (still not quite called the Revolution) sporting distinctive custom stagewear, nailing meticulous choreography for every note of the song, oozing sex appeal with each move, and becoming the purple force that would change the sound of pop radio for good. Standouts here are Jill Jones looking absurdly hot in a vaguely nautical hat, and the first time Prince showed off coordinated lighting synched to the motifs of the song.

Though this video was technically released first, it wouldn't get substantial airplay, or debut on MTV, until after his next video took off.

Little Red Corvette

More than any other, this is the video that made Prince a star. Alongside Michael Jackson, Prince would smash the color barrier at MTV through the sheer undeniable force of Litle Red Corvette's appeal. Beautiful, moody lighting carries through the whole video, making it look like nothing else on TV at the time.

Shot separately from the rest of the rest of the 1999 era videos, which had all been done in one session, Little Red Corvette was Prince's first video recorded on film. Bryan Greenburg, who directed the video, offered up a number of deeper insights into the creation of the video, including a cut sequence that would have featured Prince and Vanity tooling around in an actual little red Corvette. It's striking to think of Prince as just a 24-year-old still learning to do things like work with film cameras instead of videotape; he actually didn't realize he'd need to block out his dance moves with the cameraman, so when he did his signature split during the guitar solo, on the first take he had dropped below the frame of the camera.

It's also interesting to consider Prince's little spin moves in the pop culture moment of the time. Breakdancing was just starting to take off as a mass phenomenon, and even the few seconds of spinning Prince did in this video put him in the conversation as part of that movement, despite his having had almost no connection to hip hop.

None of that mattered, though, once the video premiered on MTV. The video rocketed the song up the charts, revived the fortunes of both the 1999 single and album, and set the stage for world domination. Suddenly, everything was purple.

Automatic

This was one of the first videos that Prince's estate shared online, and it's a scorcher. Recorded as part of the same marathon shooting schedule that captured the videos for 1999 and Let's Pretend We're Married, this shows off Jill Jones at her best, an unparalleled foil for Prince. And with the full song running for well over 8 minutes, Prince can fully let his freak flag fly; by 7 minutes on, Prince is tied to the bed onstage, and it's not long until Lisa is flogging him with a cat-o-nine-tails.

This one did not get any MTV airplay in 1982, sadly.

Automatic

1983

Let's Pretend We're Married

Unlike its sibling video Automatic, Let's Pretend We're Married was actually released as a single, albeit more than a year after the 1999 album had come out. By this time, Prince was already fully in the midst of creating the Purple Rain album and film, so this song was only a minor hit on the charts and the video, synched to a shortened edit of the song, basically never got an official release until it showed up online.

Let's Pretend We're Married

1984

When Doves Cry

Prince's most famous video, the debut of the Revolution (with the addition of Wendy Melvoin, the band was now complete), exciting footage that acted at the time as a trailer for the Purple Rain film that was then to come, and additional scenes that worked in the years that followed as a glimpse at what was cut from the movie. When Doves Cry had everything to bring Prince to the unprecedented plateau of having the number one film, album and single in the United States, all at the same time.

While the special effects at the end haven't necessarily held up as well as the rest of the clip, it was only appropriate that a song which sounded like nothing else on radio before or since was accompanied by a video that couldn't have been created by anyone but Prince. The full integratino of Prince's visual identity into his presence across media was perfected with this song and the launch of Purple Rain. In the video, he sports looks that would show up in the film, on stage during the Purple Rain tour, and in other videos from the project. The Purple Rain album even came with a poster of the backdrop illustration from the end of the clip.

And through it all, there's tons of purple, paisley and the subtle appearance of a peculiar and portentous little symbol. Just two months before this video was recorded, Prince had been in a studio all by himself, writing, recording, performing and producing every single sound on the track. By a month later, when the video debuted, he'd become one of the biggest stars in the world.

When Doves Cry

I’ve always found the construction and production of the song mesmerizing, so 2 years ago, I asked Prince about how he recorded the song. https://t.co/MeCYzmwcAd

Like many of his lyrics of the time, Prince jotted the words to When Doves Cry on a page from a spiral-bound notebook. Looks like the purple ink ran out, so he switched to pencil. pic.twitter.com/qnNY6t3ggX

(You can check out a short edit of the When Doves Cry video, too, but why would you want to?!)

Let's Go Crazy

Mirroring much of the opening scenes of the Purple Rain film, the video for Let's Go Crazy is one of the best performance videos that Prince and the Revolution ever made, while also functioning as an irresistible trailer for the film. And though it's over-edited in the final cut of the video (this was at the dawning of the hyper-fast-cutting MTV editing style), Let's Go Crazy is the first video to feature Prince soloing on his guitar in true rock god mode.

Let's Go Crazy

Purple Rain

Amazingly, Prince's signature song is among the very few of his videos that's not officially available online. (Though of course a fan has uploaded it.) Presumably, this is because the video was almost exactly the scene from the film where he performs the song, and perhaps the studio didn't want to simply share a lengthy clip of the film online.

In lieu of the proper video, here's a brief video about Prince's legendary 2007 Super Bowl halftime performance, where Prince commanded the heavens to unleash a genuine Purple Rain, and pulled off the most dominating victory of any Super Bowl ever.

You'll want to know the amazing story behind Prince's conception of Purple Rain; I've written a detailed history of his influences and inspirations for the masterwork here: I Know Times Are Changing.

I Would Die 4 U

Prince at the height of his stardom, in his very first live performance video, featuring an expanded Revolution that incorporates Sheila E. and her band, setting the stage on fire in front of 20,000 fans.

I Would Die 4 U

Baby I'm A Star

Flowing seamlessly from the I Would Die 4 U video, since it was recorded at the same concert in Maryland in November of 1984, the Baby I'm A Star is the Purple Rain tour at its most indulgent and over-the-top, giving the band a full work out for more than 13 minutes straight.

You might think it goes on too long, but check out where you're at by 11 minutes in, where Prince is going harder than James Brown in his cues to the band, controlling the dozens of people on stage and in the crew with just the twitch of his hand. Unstoppable!

Baby I'm A Star

1985

Take Me With U

Another scorching live performance, Take Me With U finds Prince and the Revolution at the height of their fame, during the Purple Rain tour, when they broke records selling out every seat in The Summit in Houston 5 times in one week.

In lieu of Appolonia's duet vocals as on the recorded song, the song becomes a rocking jam session with Prince's searing guitar solo rocketing into another gear with an interpolation of his own "Controversy" at the 3-minute mark. Add in some weird but fun special effects that make you feel like you're flying through the air while Prince shreds on his guitar, and it's hard not to love this one.

Take Me With U

4 The Tears In Your Eyes

As the phenomenon of the Purple Rain movie and tour wound down, Prince found himself in a more pensive mood. When the entire industry focused its attention on the USA for Africa effort, Prince chose to contribute a new song to the album rather than join in the "We Are The World" singalong. And in lieu of showing up for the mega-concert staged by USA for Africa, he decided to contribute an exclusive video for that new song: 4 The Tears In Your Eyes.

An unabashedly spiritual song, the version released on the charity album was a conventional rock arrangement, but the video was a very human, pensive acoustic version with just Prince, Wendy and Lisa. It was almost never aired again after the day of the USA for Africa concert.

Also notable here: this is where Prince debuted a totally new look after Purple Rain. The short hair, black and white film, and conventional trenchcoat (sans signature purple and spiky epaulets, after years of sporting the look) seemed to presage the sober aesthetic he'd adopt the following year for much of his work around the movie Under the Cherry Moon.

4 The Tears In Your Eyes

Raspberry Beret

Now, Prince might have cut his hair off after the Purple Rain tour, but that doesn't mean he was happy with how it turned out. You see, he'd also bleached it, perhaps trying to use his hair to indicate just how dramatically he was changing direction after the mega-success of his last album. But when it looked a mess, he decided to dye it back to black, with an end result that looked like a wig.

That wouldn't have been so bad, except that's the look he was sporting during one of his most famous videos ever: Raspberry Beret. Prince had first fought to not put out any video for the song, then tried to have it only be an animated video (the animation did end up being featured prominently in the clip), and finally eventually consented to appearing in the video. Accompanied by some of his best tailoring and costuming ever, with the absolutely beautiful cloud suit that perfectly evoked the song's vibe, the video helped put Prince back atop the charts almost instantly.

Despite the success, a lot of folks in the Prince camp (including members of the Revolution!) felt his hair looked like Liza Minelli in the clip, as they've mentioned in interviews. Prince himself felt that his hair evoked the style sported by Lou Ferrigno, who was then portraying The Incredible Hulk on the 80s TV show.

If you've ever had a bad haircut and hated your bangs, Raspberry Beret is the Prince song for you. (And keep your eyes peeled for a way-before-Nirvana Pat Smear in the background of the clip, too!)

Raspberry Beret

Paisley Park

Prince finally got his wish to disppear from his video, ironically on the song that would give a name to one of the most lasting parts of his legacy. Unfortunately, the video was essentially never released, and even diehard fans could only find bootleg copies of it that were sourced from a rare promo video years made by his record label years after the song came out.

Much of the public perception of the album Around The World In A Day (which included Paisley Park) was that it was Prince's "psychedelic" album. Though the influence of The Beatles and others on the album's sound has been a bit overstated, if this video had come out back then, its unabashed evocation of the aesthetics of 60s psychedelia would have undoubtedly cemented the idea that Prince had just been trying to evoke that era. Maybe it's better, then, that this video never came out at the time, allowing Paisley Park to come to represent a vision that is purely Prince's.

Paisley Park

America

Now this is what I'm talking about: one of Prince's greatest videos ever. Prince and the Revolution, in the south of France, going all-out on the funkiest jam from the Around the World In A Day album— America.

It's damn near 10 minutes long, and you will be knocked on your ass when, at 8 minutes in, after scorching guitar solos and an unbelievably funky horn section, Prince runs back and takes over the drum set. If you've ever met anybody who says, "I don't get why people like Prince so much?", show them this video. If they don't get it then, they can't be helped.

(Why were the Revolution in France? Well, as was always the case during the 80s, Prince had already moved on to his next project while he was supposed to be promoting the current one. They were filming the movie Under the Cherry Moon, the inspiration for his next album, Parade.)

America

1986

Kiss

One of Prince's biggest videos, and maybe because it's the first one where fans got to see that Prince was really, really funny. Effortlessly sexy, mugging constantly for the camera, and featuring a stripped-down set that's as minimal as the song itself, Kiss was delightful, efficient and funky.

Kiss

Mountains

Like When Doves Cry, Raspberry Beret, and Paisley Park before it, the video for Mountains has Prince and his band bluescreened in front of a video background. Like Take Me With U, there's footage of flying through the skies (though much more appropriate to the lyrics of this song). But this time, there's a cinematic breadth to the video, both due to the expansive arrangement of the song, and the presence of irresisible personalities like Kristin Scott Thomas and Jerome Benton, both of whom joined Prince in Under the Cherry Moon — the film for which this song and video were created.

In contrast to the minimalism of Kiss, this is the maximalism of the Revolution at its biggest, adding in horn players, dancers, and Prince's biggest sound yet.

Mountains

Girls & Boys

Unlikely as it may seem, one of the Revolution's funkiest songs ever is also its most elegant video ever. The expanded band shows up decked out in tuxedos and ball gowns, strutting to the unforgettable baritone saxophone riff that anchors the song. After weeks of filmng and recording in the south of France, Prince and the Revolution look as comfortable as if they'd been there their whole lives, breaking out some simple but delightful choreography at the song's fade.

But the highlight has to be Prince and Jerome Benton riffing as only they can, at 3:12 in the video. It's still absurdly funny after decades, and again shows a side of Prince's sense of humor that casual fans almost never got to see.

Girls & Boys

Anotherloverholenyohead

A wonderful glimpse into one of the most important concerts of Prince's career, his 1986 performance at Detroit's Cobo Arena on June 7, 1986 — his 28th birthday, a new maturity that was hinted at by one of the first times we ever see Prince ina suit and tie. The song was one of Prince's best slow-burning songs of the era, and as the final video appearance of the Revolution it marks the end of an incredible era.

Anotherloverholenyohead

1987

Sign O' The Times

As was his custom in the 80s, Prince continued his streak of releasing a new album each year, and in 1987 he marked the launch of his most ambitious effort yet with a video that was perhaps his most modest ever. Reflecting his growing ambivalence about the trappings of MTV-based celebrity, which had prompted him to release 1985's Around the World in a Day with no lead single or video preceding the album, his dramatic video for Sign O' The Times, lead single for its eponymous album, not only didn't feature Prince — it didn't feature any humans at all.

In its way, the Sign O' The Times video presaged the lyric videos of the YouTube and social media age, and served to center everyone's attention onto the lyrics of the song, one of Prince's most starkly political messages to that point.

Sign O' The Times

U Got The Look

Flipping from nearly invisible and focused on the world to front-and-center and outrageously sexy, Prince used the release of U Got The Look to feature an excerpt from the extraordinary Sign O' The Times concert film. Prince is all decked out in a fur coat, hoop earring and heels, and his duet partner Sheena Easton shares his peach and black palette as well as impeccable tailoring.

It's a fairly standard mid-80s high-production performance video, but the exuberance of the performance (and scandalously sexy appearances by the likes of musical director/percussionist/goddess Sheila E. as well as tour dancer Cat) elevates it to a perfect time capsule of the era.

I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man

Perhaps the best "pure" rock single of this era of Prince's career, the effervescent an unabashed pop of I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man hints at the romantic triangle that forms the nominal story of the Sign O The Times concert film, but this video is the one to watch if you want to see what is perhaps Prince's greatest band operating at its most ruthlessly powerful. Aside from the JB's at the peak of their run with James Brown or Tina Turner at her majestic best, it is almost impossible to find a document of a band making this much work look this effortless. (And do be sure to watch the entire concert film for the long version of this track — the bluesy breakdown and weeping guitar solo stand proud alongside Prince's very best solos ever.)

I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man

1988

Alphabet St.

Alphabet St. is an extraordinarily colorful and hyper-saturated vision, reflecting Prince's desire that everything from the music to the visuals to the clothing design of the song should evoke a cartoon in its garishness and vibrance. But following a spiritual (and professional) reckoning after the cancelled release of his notorious Black Album just a few months earlier, Alphabet St. was clearly meant to reset Prince's persona for a new era.

The effects and extensive text overlays are very clearly of their era, but Prince's extreme eccentricity in everything from his choice of costume to his burying of hidden messages throughout the video keep the video from seeming as dated as it otherwise might. Indeed, the repetition and hyperactive editing of the clip make it one of the first of Prince's videos that seem to presage today's meme-based media.

Alphabet St.

Glam Slam

Something of an obscurity due to the relative lack of chart success of the single, Glam Slam is perhaps best regarded as a document of Prince's most ambitious effort of the 80s, the Lovesexy album and tour. The album was an extremely challenging work, attempting to introduce his giant audience to a deeply personal, if somewhat obtuse, spiritual vision. And the accompanying tour was extremely ambitious in its staging, as becomes obvious in the Glam Slam video, which features the entire band choreographed in-the-round as they were on the tour. Add to that an entire string section, Prince's first coterie of male backup dancers, and elaborate spandex-ridden costumes, and the overall effect is a definite sense that more is more.

Glam Slam

I Wish U Heaven

A delicate, almost minimal melody closes out the Lovesexy era for Prince, with a series of surreal and evocative objects working to pull us into a dreamlike state. One of the most effects-heavy videos Prince ever made, the clip was directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino, enjoying his heyday in the years between his directing of Tom Wait's "Downtown Train" and Madonna's "Justify My Love".

I Wish U Heaven

1989

Batdance

It's too bad "U Got The Look" was already taken, because this is a look. Prince latched into the Batmania that took over the world in 1989, and extended the mythos of the Burton/Keaton/Nicholson (and Basinger) film into a truly bizarre, brilliant visual that nobody else in the world could ever have attempted, let alone pulled off so well that it became a staple of both MTV and radio.

It's hard to itemize everything that's absurd and amazing about this clip. It's the first appearance of "Gemini", the half-Batman, half-Joker character that Prince had imagined as a persona on his soundtrack album. It's the first onscreen appearance of studio nerd Prince, alternating between geeking out on his samplers, keyboards and computers, and then hopping on top of the console to shred on one of his custom guitars.

It only gets weirder from there. An army of dancing Jokers and Batmen, a phalanx of Vicki Vales, and allusions to everything from Frank Miller's seminal Dark Knight to the theme song of the campy 60s Adam West series to, well... what we all imagined Paisley Park must have looked like?

In a world where we have a high-production-value comic book movie coming out every 3 weeks, it's hard to emphasize exactly how outrageous and incomprehensible this video seemed at the time. But as I noted in the years-long Twitter thread that I've been writing about the song, at three decades later, Batdance seems like it perfectly predicted the era of viral videos and how to market a superhero franchise with a meme-ready production.

29/47,619 With its frenetic editing & many Easter eggs, Batdance’s video feels like it was made for the meme era. https://t.co/lzNRNYqFIU

An amusing bit of trivia: Batdance was directed by Albert Magnoli, who had, a little over 5 years earlier, also directed Purple Rain.

Batdance

Partyman

Given how successful the Batman project was commercially, and how much Prince had invested in creating characters like Gemini, it's not surprising we saw his Batman universe continue into another video. The song was in some ways a pastiche of 1999 (which it had replaced in the Batman film), but given its prominence in scenes with Jack Nicholson, it was a no-brainer to choose for a single.

The scope and scale are astounding for a Prince video — there are countless extras, and from the minute Prince walks in (whistling "The Arms of Orion", also from the Batman soundtrack), the stakes keep going up. There's Joker-level mayhem throughout, Prince shows off his (genuine) ability to play a piano while lying on top of it, and just a year after Michael Jackson had ended part of his Moonwalker home video by pretending to balk at Bubbles the chimp wearing a Prince t-shirt, the Partyman video features... a chimp.

Though MTV only ever aired the single edit of the clip, the extended version is now widely available to stream, and it does full justice to the full madness Prince had pictured for the song. And though the song closes with a title saying, "This ain't over..." (or まだ終わりじゃないよ) it's sadly the last we'd see of Gemini in a video.

Partyman

Scandalous

Again veering from a massive production to something intimate and seductive, we come to one of Prince's very best seduction ballads, Scandalous. This clip clearly sets the stage for what D'Angelo would escalate a decade later with Untitled, though Prince appears here in a red jumpsuit instead of his birthday suit.

Though it's his most minimal video ever, employing just some simple lights, a microphone stand, and creative editing of Prince's solo performance, it perfectly suits the song and sets the song apart from not just its placement on a superhero soundtrack, but the rest of Prince's entire catalog. It's no wonder this was one of the rare times when a shot from a video became the cover of the single it was meant to promote.

Scandalous single coverScandalous

1990

Thieves In The Temple

Thieves In The Temple (Extended)

(The much more common short version of the video is available, of course.)

New Power Generation

The Question Of U

1991

Gett Off

Gett Off

Gett Off (Houstyle)

Gett Off (Houstyle)

Violet The Organ Grinder

Violet the Organ Grinder

Gangster Glam

Gangster Glam

Clockin’ The Jizz

Cream

Cream (Extended)

(This is one of those videos that has a short edit, which omits all of the introductory drama.)

Diamonds And Pearls

Diamonds And Pearls

1992

Money Don't Matter 2 Night (Spike Lee version)

Money Don't Matter 2 Night (Spike Lee version)

Money Don't Matter 2 Night (performance version)

Money Don't Matter 2 Night (Performance Version)

Jughead

Insatiable

Insatiable

Willing And Able

Willing And Able

Strollin’

Call The Law

Call The Law

Live 4 Love

Live 4 Love

Sexy M.F.

Sexy M.F.

2 Whom It May Concern

2 Whom It May Concern

My Name Is Prince

My Name Is Prince

Love 2 The 9's

Love 2 The 9's

The Morning Papers

The Morning Papers

The Max

The Max

Blue Light

Blue Light

Eye Wanna Melt With U

Sweet Baby

Sweet Baby

The Continental

Damn U

Damn U

7

7

1993

Peach

Hmm! I wonder why this one isn't online yet.

Pink Cashmere

Nothing Compares 2 U

Though there is a video of the live version of the song released in 1993, the estate hasn't yet released the footage.

1994

Interactive

Days Of Wild

Now

Race

Pheromone

Shhh

Acknowledge Me

Come

Loose

Papa

The Most Beautiful Girl In The World

The Most Beautiful Girl In The World (Beautiful)

The Most Beautiful Girl In The World (Mustang Mix)

Endorphinmachine

Endorphinmachine

Love Sign

Love Sign

Letitgo

When 2 R In Love

Dolphin

Dolphin

1995

Purple Medley

Purple Medley

Eye Hate U

Eye Hate U

Gold

Gold

Rock 'N Roll Is Alive! (And It Lives In Minneapolis)

Rock And Roll Is Alive! (And It Lives In Minneapolis)

1996

Dinner With Delores

Dinner With Delores

The Same December

The Same December

I Like It There

I Like It There

Betcha By Golly Wow!

Betcha By Golly Wow

1997

Somebody's Somebody

Somebody's Somebody

The Holy River

The Holy River

Face Down

Face Down

1998

Come On

1999

Beautiful Strange

Beautiful Strange

The Greatest Romance Ever Sold

The Greatest Romance Ever Sold

2000

One Song

How Wit U (Nasty Girl Remix)

Hot Wit U

2001

U Make My Sun Shine

U Make My Sun Shine

When Eye Lay My Hands On U

I actually don't have this video! And have never seen it. It's a tough one to find.

Living in New York City, the one fantasy sport that everybody plays is real estate; we all like to imagine what it would be like to be able to afford to buy a place. And sometime over the last year or two, I realized that, even if I won the lottery and could afford to buy a home in my preferred neighborhood (the Lower East Side), I probably wouldn’t get one in most of the places I'd want to live. Because I think over the 30-year term of that mortgage, our neighborhood will be significantly destabilized by climate change.

It was a bit of a shock for me to come to this realization, because the logic is extremely straightforward, but I hadn’t really considered the implications at that visceral level. I hadn't yet let the science change my daydreaming about an HGTV future. And as I’ve talked about that reality to more and more people in my circle of friends, a curious pattern has emerged. They’ve all found the rationale around the impacts of climate change unimpeachable, but nearly all are very reluctant to embrace the conclusion that this logic inevitably yields.

In our neighborhood, it’s easy to see the impacts of increasingly-powerful storms. We were hit hard by Sandy, with power outages for days or weeks, and severe disruptions for months. I still see buildings with the high-water mark outlined on them, and I still remember which places stayed open to serve people in those incredibly dark nights when we didn't even have street lights to show the way. Any day now, they’ll be shutting down the most essential subway line in our neighborhood for massive tunnel repairs that are expected to take years to complete. This is all still recovery from a storm that most of the country has already forgotten about, that the popular memory remembers as "not as bad as they thought it was going to be".

But if you talk to transit advocates or city council members or the state officials responsible for funding such repairs (and I do), many of them predicate their argument for repairing our subway tunnel on the idea that we’ll be “fixing the problem”. We've got to fix a subway tunnel, right? It’s okay to amortize the cost of repairs to this tunnel over years or decades because then we’ll be in good shape, right?

I don’t think so.

We’re still acting like today, and the recent past, is an aberration, and the future will involve things "returning to normal". We're all making assumptions about when New York City will be hit again by another Sandy-scale storm. Most infrastructure investments are still being made with an assumed “storm of the century” mindset, where it’ll be decades until we confront this kind of disruption again. But it's far more likely, given that the rate of climate change is accelerating, that we’ll see such disruption again within a few years. The big storms we confront in the coming decades won’t always be on the scale of Sandy, but they will hit with far more energy and impact and frequency.

And when they do, not only will not be ready, we’ll be nowhere near prepared for the rebuilding and reinvestment that it will take to recover. We'll have spent our time and resources on investments that treat extreme climate disruption as the exception, instead of the norm.

We're Bad At This

Much has been written in recent years about how human societies are bad at catching on to creeping threats, as opposed to acute dangers. Western societies in particular seem vulnerable to this, and America at this specific moment seems oriented toward willfully ignoring any long-term trends or obvious threats, in favor of conjuring up imagined dangers. There’s a long strain of anti-intellectualism and short-term profiteering that has led to this point, but the years of effort in undermining science and introducing doubt into the existence of scientific consensus have produced an awful, if inevitable, outcome. Many of our political leaders in power seem shockingly comfortable with encouraging a death cult amongst their followers; this began with normalizing violence but easily evolves into an environment where existential threats are treated as exciting opportunities for a rapturous reckoning, rather than a threat to everyone.

In the past, we at least were able to treat galvanizing moments of obvious threats as a catalyst for change. For example, we reacted in the extreme to the shock and tragedy of 9/11. Unfortunately, our thoughtless reaction has delivered Bin Laden an almost total victory by embracing nearly every costly, self-defeating tactic possible. But even in losing the war on terror we certainly demonstrated that we were able to use the death of thousands as a motivation to make huge, costly, sweeping changes in society. It’s even possible to imagine what might have happened if we’d responded to the shock of 9/11 with an urgent effort to make positive changes instead of destructive ones.

This time, though, we had a catastrophe with a far higher death toll, and far higher economic toll, than 9/11, and the regime in power decided to act as if nothing had happened. Puerto Rico's awful fate under Maria was rendered even more horrific by a political response that began with indifference and then degenerated into overt denial. We can almost imagine Trump staring at the smouldering piles of rubble where the Twin Towers had stood, and not merely crowing about how his buildings had moved up in the list of tallest skyscrapers, but actively denying that anyone had died in the World Trade Center at all. Now imagine the rest of us, knowing there was going to be another 9/11 every few years, pretending that it wasn't going to be us who gets targeted next.

Beyond Despair

I know it doesn't sound like it, but I'm an optimist. The reason I love technology and popular culture so much is because I never stop being inspired by what humans create. But I try to be pretty good at seeing where society is heading, and judging where our tastes and trends will take us over time. Usually, that just requires looking at patterns of the past, and learning from that history. This time, I don't think that works.

There isn't going to be a last-minute reprieve on climate that lets us keep living in the world we used to have.

Today's political environment demands that scientists still talk about the steps it takes to limit global temperate increase to 1.5° C. That is not going to happen. I don't even think we're going to limit the increase to 2°C within my lifetime. I believe the millions of climate-chased refugees around the world today will be joined by tens of millions more tomorrow. I believe the increasing frequency of sectarian or regional violence instigated by climate-driven disruption of access to water or food will result in more large-scale conflicts. I think governments, even in wealthier or recently stable regions, will be destabilized by the stresses climate disruption places on infrastructure for food, water, transportation, immigration and trade.

But I do also think some large-scale changes in behavior wil happen faster than we've ever seen in human history. Solar power will gain efficiency and drop in cost at a rate that mimics the progress in smartphones over the last decade. While it'll still be an expensive and resource-intensive effort to create all these solar cells, they'll be able to beat fossil fuels in every regard — including cost — much sooner than people expect, and with far greater impact than we might predict. I'm not quite as bullish on the path for invention and innovation around removing carbon from the environment, but I wouldn't entirely bet against it, either.

The undermining of the United States' political credibility in the world, and the weakening of its cultural domination over the world, will also yield some benefits in mitigating climate disruption as fewer cultures seek American-style consumption as part of their lifestyles. Not craving giant cars and meat-filled meals will be good for the world, and we're already seeing that shift happen within the United States as well.

All this could add up to enough to have a huge positive impact in just a few decades. That will, sadly, not be enough to save the millions of lives that we'll see lost to climate disruption in the next half-century. But it's possible that millions of people may still be living in Manhattan in 50 years. I'd put the odds at a little less than 50/50.

Higher Ground

I don't know how this plays out. Not a day goes by that I don't grieve for the horrible tragedies my son is going to have to watch unfold during his lifetime because of our collective shortsightedness and failure to act. The reckoning now is whether what's left after all that chaos still resembles the society we have today (yes, even with all its grave and awful injustices) or if the jolt of these changes is too extreme. It's possible that things become so unpredictable and contentious due to climate change that we never find a new political or cultural stability during his lifetime.

It's hard to believe these things and still have hope, even knowing that our privilege and access and good fortune and talents isolate us from the worst that will come. As a New Yorker who lived here at that time, I still use 9/11 as a reference because it really did change my whole life and my whole perspective. But as the climate evolves, there's a 9/11 every week.

This year, it's wildfires and hurricanes and typhoons and floods and every single one is a record breaker — until next year. I don't know how to say it to make people understand, this isn't about "this year". This is the rest of our lives. I don't even think it makes sense to talk about "preventing" climate disruption now. It's here, and it's already unavoidable for those lowest in society, literally or figuratively. The question is how we move on to preparing for it, for building resiliency into all the institutions and infrastructures that will need to evolve, and how we care for those who are most vulnerable as we keep moving down the path we've chosen.

Honestly, that thought doesn't depress me (though I understand why for so many, it will). It's simply the work in front of us, the task we have to do. I don't feel hopeless because there's no point to feeling hopeless. We simply have to build a world that keeps working while the one that we have today starts to disappear.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/10/03/were-still-not-being-alarmist-enough-about-climate-change/“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!”

There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the ridiculous assertion that they’re not able to speak in public. What they actually mean is they no longer understand the

There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the ridiculous assertion that they’re not able to speak in public. What they actually mean is they no longer understand the basis of the criticisms they face. And it’s a phenomenon we see from so many people who have a public platform, whether they’re CEOs or comedians or other cultural figures.

Some of this is a familiar issue: the powerful think that ordinary people have no right to criticize them. There’s nothing new there, and certainly a lot of the dismissive reactions are simply these people thinking that they’re better than their critics, and so don’t have to listen to the pushback. But even those who think they should still be at least pretending to take feedback from the public are mystified by what they’re hearing.

But there is something new that's also helping cause all this fuss: the rate of change in culture is increasing.

For some kinds of people, we valorize the breaking of social conventions. In business, it’s called “disruption”, in arts or culture they’ll be called “bad boys” or other similarly ridiculous names for rewarding transgression. Eventually, these rule breakers (who, of course, seldom break the rules of systemic racism or sexism or other structural injustices) find themselves in a position where they have a public voice. They’re onstage, or quoted in the media, and they love the fact that they’re being heard. They bask in the unalloyed adulation of the masses.

Until recently. All of a sudden, the same things they’ve always said, or something said in private that suddenly becomes public, get a vociferous negative response unlike anything they've ever encountered. Usually, that blowback happens on social media, and these powerful legacy leaders tend to blame the issue on some ineffable negative essence of social networks. They rant about things like "the twitter mob". But that's not the issue at all.

There Is No "Twitter Mob"

You see, there is no "Twitter mob", there's only people. And people shape culture, and culture evolves. But in the past, the powerful could keep themselves isolated from the way culture evolves, if they wanted to. Janet Jackson didn't even know what Hot Cheetos are!

And so, these political leaders and CEOs and comedians and famous-for-being-famous people blather on like they always have, but only now they're faced with the criticisms they've inspired. The criticisms were always there, but the connection of social media to mass media has made them visible.

Worse, that visibility of critique means that powerful people now have to do work that they didn't want to do. They can't stand it.

Suddenly, even the most powerful people in society are forced to be fluent in the concerns of those with little power, if they want to hold on to the cultural relevance that thrust them into power in the first place. Being a comedian means having to say things that an audience finds funny; if an audience doesn't find old, hackneyed, abusive jokes funny anymore, then that comedian has to do more work. And what we find is, the comedians with the most privilege resent having to keep working for a living. Wasn't it good enough that they wrote that joke that some people found somewhat funny, some years ago? Why should they have to learn about current culture just to get paid to do comedy?

Similarly, CEOs keep fussing about how it's hard to not offend people these days. (Being a CEO myself, this one ends up on my radar a lot.) Now, every person in marketing knows they have to try to stay culturally relevant, and certainly every ordinary worker knows they constantly have to be learning new skills and developing professionally. But if a CEO has been in his seat long enough, he'll often get deeply resentful of being told that he has to learn new ways of being respectful to the people who were systematically obstructed from reaching his awareness in the past.

We can't even count all the stupid ways this plays out, but there are common tropes. The go-to examples of resistance to cultural evolution are always the legacy power-holders resisting the very identity of the communities they excluded. You'll hear awful shit like, "I don't know whether to call them Black or African American, or what?" or terrible "jokes" about the appropriate pronouns that people should be identified with. Now, these powerful folks don't want to be held accountable for disrespecting people with different identities, and the powerful certainly don't want to be mocked for their illiteracy in contemporary culture, but they damn sure want to make certain that you know they're not interested in indulging modern norms for showing respect to others.

It's not that hard

Here's the thing, though: It's not that hard. It's not difficult at all to ask people how they want to be identified. It's not tricky to listen to what people are saying about their concerns and their issues, and to try to understand what that means about how culture is evolving. It's not hard at all to be humble about unfamiliar aspects of society and ask for information in respectful ways, then take those responses into consideration going forward.

And in fact, that's the simple price of continued cultural relevance. If someone wants to maintain power in culture, all that's required is a sincere and honest engagement with those who are granting that power through their attention and support. All it takes is a little bit of curiousity and some basic human decency, and any of us who are blessed with the good fortune to have a platform will get to keep it, and hopefully to use it to make things a little better for others.

But those in power who have a loud public voice and refuse to adjust and evolve their messages for the modern world will only face increasing resistance, and even actual accountability sometimes — perhaps even in the form of losing their platforms. And good riddance.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/09/13/the-price-of-relevance-is-fluency/For the first decade after the attacks, I basically didn’t go anywhere near that part of downtown. A business meeting would take me a few blocks away, and I’d feel that tightness in my chest, that presence, and I’d just keep moving.

For the first decade after the attacks, I basically didn’t go anywhere near that part of downtown. A business meeting would take me a few blocks away, and I’d feel that tightness in my chest, that presence, and I’d just keep moving.

But this morning, I’ll walk out of the (newly-opened!) A train access and walk through the Oculus as part of my commute, as I’ve done dozens of times before. Somehow, improbably, its all become routine.

To be clear, I do still deliberately steer away from the reflecting pools and the memorials. And I give an even wider berth to the tourists drawn to them. (“Which way is 9/11?”) But somehow this place is something more than its ghosts now, and I’m able to be a transit nerd who appreciates a beautiful, if absurd, train station, or to be a person who appreciates a farmer’s market, even as it sprawls just steps away from where I remember seeing that still-smoldering pile of rubble.

People don’t even really ask, “Where were you that day?” anymore. For all of the ironic “Never Forget”s, the whole moment has largely faded into history, even as the whole world really was reshaped. There’s a mall there now, a temple to the “go back to shopping” doctrine introduced in those first days of chaos and grief. In the current moment, it’s clearer than ever that those murderous attackers succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams, achieving forms of destruction and destabilization that they probably never even dreamed of.

But there’s something ordinary, too. If this has become the New Normal, the most unlikely part may be that it’s still a kind of normal.

I spent so many years thinking “I can’t go there” that it caught me completely off guard to realize that going there is now routine. Maybe the most charitable way to look at it is resiliency, or that I’m seeing things through the eyes of my child who’s never known any reality but the present one. I'd spent a lot of time wishing that we hadn''t been so overwhelmed with response to that day, so much that I hadn''t considered what it would be like when the day passed for so many people with barely a notice at all.

In Past Years

Each year I write about the attacks on this anniversary, to reflect both on that day and where I'm at right now. I also deeply appreciate the conversation that ensues with those who check in with me every year.

So, like ten years ago, I’m letting go. Trying not to project my feelings onto this anniversary, just quietly remembering that morning and how it felt. My son asked me a couple of months ago, “I heard there was another World Trade Center before this one?” and I had to find a version of the story that I could share with him. In this telling, losing those towers was unimaginably sad and showed that there are incredibly hurtful people in the world, but there are still so many good people, and they can make wonderful things together.

I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them.
What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now.

For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.

There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.

I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact.
But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.

These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.

I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City.
Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.
And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.

[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.
Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.
We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.

I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.

I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.

[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse…
I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/09/11/seventeen-is-almost-just-another-day/Forgive me, for I am about to commit gadget blogging. I've been using an iPhone X since they came out, and almost from the start my battery has charged between two and three time the default speed of most people's phones. All you need is one new cable to do]]>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/Y5bIt3vlNhM/5b4286ce839d8a0059933699Fri, 03 Aug 2018 14:11:02 GMT

Forgive me, for I am about to commit gadget blogging. I've been using an iPhone X since they came out, and almost from the start my battery has charged between two and three time the default speed of most people's phones. All you need is one new cable to do it.

The short version: The iPhone X (and iPhone 8) supports a fast-charging mode. If you spend a little bit of money on a higher-wattage charger, you can fill up your battery much faster, especially when it's really low.

Here's what the results look like with the fast-charging setup that I've got now, starting from a phone that was down to only 2% battery charge:

Time (minutes)

0

4

20

75

90

120

Charge

2%

10%

37%

83%

91%

97%

Underpowered

It's a strange way of pinching pennies on a phone that costs a thousand dollars, but Apple still includes their chintzy little square phone charger with every iPhone sold. It's barely changed over the last decade, and puts out a paltry 5 watts. On the plus side, it is small and doesn't block adjacent outlets, which I suppose is nice for people who are short on space.

But here's the terrible part: If the regular 5W charger is the only charger you use with an iPhone X, and your battery is running really low, plugging in for half an hour will only add about 20% to your battery. You'll still be in Low Power Mode after half an hour! That is no good.

As always with Apple, the solution is to spend money. It's more money than you want to spend, but enough that we'll all just suck it up and pay. Yay, Apple!

Overkill

I've ended up with a solution that is, admittedly, overkill. Through an absurd series of events, I ended up with an extra of Apple's most expensive charger: The 87 Watt USB-C Power Adapter. This is the most powerful laptop charger Apple sells, using its latest USB-C connector. Only the top-of-the-line 15" MacBook Pro even comes with this kind of power supply; the rest of the MacBooks make do with 61 Watts or less — the regular MacBook only comes with a 29 Watt charger! But each of these chargers uses USB-C, the new universal cable that's both enticingly simple and infuriatingly prone to unpredictable incompatibilties around power and data capabilities. The bottom line is, you don't need the ridiculously high-powered Macbook charger because any of the Apple USB-C chargers can do the job. If you don't have any of these USB-C chargers, I've heard good things about Anker's 30W power plug.

Once you've got one of these power bricks, or an extra USB-C port on your MacBook or iMac, it's time for the key step: grab Apple's USB-C to Lightning cable, which is frustratingly overpriced at twenty bucks, but worth it. (Amazingly, this represents a 25% price drop for this particular cable over last year's prices.)

That's it. Plug in your pricey new USB-C to Lightning cable, and you'll be topping up your iPhone battery much faster. Of course, it matters most if your charge level gets really low — if you're already at 95%, none of these products will make much of a difference for getting to 100%.

I've also used a number of the popular wireless charging (Qi) devices that the iPhone X and iPhone 8 support, and while they certainly work, they're really slow. I much prefer the speed of having my battery fill faster to the convenience of not having to plug in a cable, unless I'm at a public/shared charge point like at a coffee shop or airport.

The rumors are that Apple is going to include the USB-C to Lightning cable along with the next generation of iPhones, and they certainly should. The default experience for people buying a top-of-the-line phone ought to be the fastest charging experience possible.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/08/03/a-much-faster-way-to-charge-your-iphone-x/At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of]]>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/WGT5rC7ycDI/5b48ad014023bb0055972b7bFri, 13 Jul 2018 15:41:09 GMT

At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of our digital lives.

Keeping in mind that spirit of doing necessary maintenance, I recently did something I'd thought about doing for years: I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. Now, these kinds of decisions are oddly fraught; a lot of people see their following relationships on social media as a form of status, not merely an indication of where information is flowing between people. But I decided to assume that the people I'm connected to know that me unfollowing everyone isn't personal, but really just a response to the overwhelming noise of having more than 5000 accounts sharing info with me on a single network.

How I did it

Okay, this part is gonna get slightly geeky, if you're not a coder, but I thought I'd explain the process in case anyone wants to repeat it.

Years ago, Twitter used to have a command-line interface for performing bulk or automated actions on an account. They abandoned it after a while, so Erik Berlin created a new command-line tool for power users of Twitter, simply called "t". It's written in Ruby (a language I basically can read but not really write) so it's easy enough to get running if you follow the few simple setup steps.

As Erik mentions in that documentation, you'll then need to set up a new Twitter app on your account, and get the credentials that will let the t tool perform actions on your Twitter account. (Note: I got some errors while updating and authenticating; making these edits to one of the ruby libraries that t depends on fixed the issue immediately.)

The Plan

At that point, I wanted to follow a few simple steps. These took a little longer for me because I was following over 5,000 people on Twitter, but if you're following a more reasonable number, none of these steps should take more than a few minutes to complete. This was my plan:

Copy all the people I was following to a Twitter list, so I could still access them in my Twitter apps on all my devices, and I could still see my old timeline at any point if I wanted to.

Archive all of the people I was following into a spreadsheet, so I could sort through them and filter for geography or how many followers they have or whether they were verified or not — basically any criteria that might be interesting when deciding who to follow (or not follow).

Actually unfollow everybody and start over.

As it turns out, each of these steps is pretty easy.

Copying all your followers to a List

If you want to back up all of your followers, you only need to make a list and then populate it. You can make lists in most regular Twitter apps, but to do it at the command line it's simple: type in t list create following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"` to make a list named after the current date, so you can easily remember this was a list of who you were following as of today. You can pretty easily understand the t syntax here — commands like list create are pretty self-explanatory.

Next, we have a slightly more elaborate command to copy all of your followers to the new list; you'll dump out a list of everyone you follow, and then pipe that into another t command to add them to your new list. It works like so: t followings | xargs t list add following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`. (If you're like me, you'll be doing all this stuff around midnight, and the date will change in the middle of it, and you should just type in the current date instead of using date variables.)

That's it! Now you've got a list of all your followers, and if you browse that list in your Twitter client app, you should see the exact same thing as your regular timeline. Do note, though, that Twitter lists don't function well with more than a few thousand followers. It took hours for all 5,000+ of my followers to show up on the list, and in the interim the counts of how many people belonged to the list were often incorrect.

Archiving your followers into a spreadsheet

This one is just a fun thing to do in general, if you like to slice and dice data about your social network. t supports exporting a pretty broad set of data about your followers, not just their names and Twitter handles, by allowing for a "long format" export with complete data. You get stuff like how many favorites (likes) they have on Twitter, when their account was created, and how many people they follow or are followed by. Frustratingly, Twitter no longer makes it easy for this data export to include whether that person follows you or not; that requires an additional query.

You'll use CSV (comma-separated values) as the format for exporting your data into a spreadsheet. And good news! t supports that natively. So your command will look like this: t followings -l --csv > followings.csv which basically says "Export my followings, in long format, to a CSV file named 'followings.csv'." Once you do that, you can open it up in Excel or Google Sheets in a few clicks, and you're all set.

After all the people I followed were in a spreadsheet, I was able to sort by how many followers or followings they had, and also their last update, and I found friends who'd passed away whose accounts had been dormant for years, or joke accounts whose relevance had expired, or quiet voices with small networks that had been drowned out amongst the cacophany of the many other voices I was hearing each day. I found this part to be a really worthwhile exercise, and definitely decided to follow fewer people with huge networks and lots of reach.

Actually unfollowing!

Then, it was time for the main event: actually unfollowing everybody. I don't think this will be as much of a problem for other folks, but trying to run a single process of unfollowing everybody had me repeatedly running into Twitter's rate limits, where they try to keep any app from performing too many actions on your account in too short a period of time. I ended up writing a simple script to do the unfollowing in batches, then pausing for a few minutes, then starting up again.

But with a more reasonable network, the command to unfollow everyone is extremely simple:

t followings | xargs t unfollow

It'll chug away for a few minutes, and then that's it! You're not following anybody anymore. Except it might still look like you are.

A number of people are noticing that my follower count says something other than 5, or that you see incorrect lists of who I follow. This is an artifact of a design called “eventual consistency”, which Twitter & other distributed systems use to help scale. https://t.co/FGzQ9qR0SG

In my case, my follower count was wrong for days, and kept showing wildly inaccurate information like insisting that I was following one of Mike Pence's official accounts. (Needless to say, that was never the case.) All of this is due to a architectural decision called eventual consistency, which helps enable Twitter to scale to its massive size, but doesn't do as good a job of handling unusual circumstances like being able to immediately see the correct list of followers for someone who has just unfollowed thousands of accounts.

Nevertheless, the deed was done. I refollowed a few essential accounts (my family, @Glitch and @Prince, and was ready to start anew.

Lessons learned

It's been about a week and a half, and, well... Twitter is a lot more pleasant. I've chosen a handful of accounts to follow each day (most ones that I followed before, some entirely new to me) and it's made a big difference. On the flip side, about 100 people seem to have unfollowed me after I unfollowed everybody, and I hope they hadn't felt obligated just to reciprocate if I was following them before. (That might also just be how many people unfollow me in a given week, I dunno.)

One of the most immediate benefits is that, when something terrible happens in the news, I don't see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.

Similarly, I've focused a lot more on artists and activists and people who write about the stuff I'm obsessed with in general — Prince or mangoes or urban transit or the like. That brings a lot more joy into my life, and people writing about these other topics offer alot more inspiration for the things I want to be focused on. Oddly, given that my job is being the CEO of a tech company, I follow far fewer people in tech, and almost no tech company accounts except for my own. Despite that, I've missed almost nothing significant in the industry since making this change.

The algorithm is learning

Most interesting to me is how the suggested content and accounts on Twitter have changed since I changed my network. Before, much of the suggested headlines or featured Tweets in my Twitter apps would be from categories like "Technology VC"; now they're much more likely to be about "Climate Change" or "Comedians" than about inside-baseball tech talk.

On the less positive side, Twitter still suggests that I follow accounts that are almost entirely men, and overwhelmingly white American men with verified Twitter accounts. This is bizarre to me as I'm now following nearly 100 accounts, and they're basically the same mix of races and genders and geographies that I've always been interested in hearing from. I would have expected Twitter's follow-suggestion algorithm to be at least as adaptive as its content-suggestion one, and hope that it'll get updated to feature accounts that don't fit the usual privileged patterns. (I do still follow a lot of verified accounts, but some of that is due to an oddity I've just realized, which is that a lot of my friends have verified accounts. Look, ma — I'm a big-city elite!)

What Follows

I don't have some grand takeaway about what all this means; obviously, I've been thinking about the design and impacts and best use of social networks on the web for basically as long as they've existed. I strongly believe we should be intentional in how we use our networks, and even spent years building tools to encourage that, though the corporate interest of the major social networks precludes building a business around encouraging healthier use of their platforms.

But I'm happy for making a conscious decision about managing my network, and I lament that it takes a pretty extreme level of technical knowledge to be able to do so. I first wrote about Twitter when it was only a few months old, talking about its promise and predicting that Twitter would adopt @messaging and adapt to other ways its community was inventing new behaviors. Some of that happened, but of course most of what power users (and vulnerable users) wanted was never created.

Anything worth doing is worth doing meta. And Tom and Jerry is no exception.

I've been trying to learn a bit more about the various eras of the Tom and Jerry cartoon, from the mega-racist Hanna-Barbera originals to the extremely stylized Chuck Jones episodes.

Somewhere in the middle are the truly odd Gene Deitch-directed Tom and Jerry cartoons, where Deitch criticized the violence and monotony of the cartoons using the cartoons themselves.

This self-critique reached its apotheosis with The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit from 1962. In it, Deitch spells out the formula for a rote cartoon while deconstructing it. I'd only ever seen this once as a kid, on TV at a friend's house, but it left an impression as if I'd seen it in a full-size theater during its original presetnation.

Here, see it for yourself. It's less than 7 minutes of your time, and has aged surprisingly well.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/05/10/the-cartoon-kit/Today's most fun new Glitch app is Record Player, which lets you upload a photo, then uses Google Cloud's Vision API to recognize the image and play it on Spotify.

It works really well, but the real fun starts when you upload a selfie or a picture of yourself.

Today's most fun new Glitch app is Record Player, which lets you upload a photo, then uses Google Cloud's Vision API to recognize the image and play it on Spotify.

It works really well, but the real fun starts when you upload a selfie or a picture of yourself.

I especially love that this was made by Patrick Weaver on the Mouse.org team, because it makes me think that kids learning computer science from Mouse curriculum here in NYC are going to start by seeing tech as enabling fun apps like this one! And you can, of course, View Source for the app and remix it to make your own variations.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/05/02/its-like-shazam-for-your-face/Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to understand the principles that determine how tech affects our lives.

Understanding technology today

Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to understand the principles that determine how tech affects our lives.

Understanding technology today

Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions. That can be a little bit hard to understand if we only judge tech as a set of consumer products that we purchase. But tech goes a lot deeper than the phones in our hands, and we must understand some fundamental shifts in society if we’re going to make good decisions about the way tech companies shape our lives—and especially if we want to influence the people who actually make technology.

Even those of us who have been deeply immersed in the tech world for a long time can miss the driving forces that shape its impact. So here, we’ll identify some key principles that can help us understand technology’s place in culture.

What you need to know:

1. Tech is not neutral.

One of the most important things everybody should know about the apps and services they use is that the values of technology creators are deeply ingrained in every button, every link, and every glowing icon that we see. Choices that software developers make about design, technical architecture or business model can have profound impacts on our privacy, security and even civil rights as users. When software encourages us to take photos that are square instead of rectangular, or to put an always-on microphone in our living rooms, or to be reachable by our bosses at any moment, it changes our behaviors, and it changes our lives.

All of the changes in our lives that happen when we use new technologies do so according to the priorities and preferences of those who create those technologies.

2. Tech is not inevitable.

Popular culture presents consumer technology as a never-ending upward progression that continuously makes things better for everybody. In reality, new tech products usually involve a set of tradeoffs where improvements in areas like usability or design come along with weaknesses in areas like privacy & security. Sometimes new tech is better for one community while making things worse for others. Most importantly, just because a particular technology is “better” in some way doesn’t guarantee it will be widely adopted, or that it will cause other, more popular technologies to improve.
In reality, technological advances are a lot like evolution in the biological world: there are all kinds of dead-ends or regressions or uneven tradeoffs along the way, even if we see broad progress over time.

3. Most people in tech sincerely want to do good.

We can be thoughtfully skeptical and critical of modern tech products and companies without having to believe that most people who create tech are “bad”. Having met tens of thousands of people around the world who create hardware and software, I can attest that the cliché that they want to change the world for the better is a sincere one. Tech creators are very earnest about wanting to have a positive impact. At the same time, it’s important for those who make tech to understand that good intentions don’t absolve them from being responsible for the negative consequences of their work, no matter how well-intentioned.

It’s useful to acknowledge the good intentions of most people in tech because it lets us follow through on those intentions and reduce the influence of those who don’t have good intentions, and to make sure the stereotype of the thoughtless tech bro doesn’t overshadow the impact that the majority of thoughtful, conscientious people can have. It’s also essential to believe that there is good intention underlying most tech efforts if we’re going to effectively hold everyone accountable for the tech they create.

4. Tech history is poorly documented and poorly understood.

People who learn to create tech can usually find out every intimate detail of how their favorite programming language or device was created, but it’s often near impossible to know why certain technologies flourished, or what happened to the ones that didn’t. While we’re still early enough in the computing revolution that many of its pioneers are still alive and working to create technology today, it’s common to find that tech history as recent as a few years ago has already been erased. Why did your favorite app succeed when others didn’t? What failed attempts were made to create such apps before? What problems did those apps encounter — or what problems did they cause? Which creators or innovators got erased from the stories when we created the myths around today’s biggest tech titans?

All of those questions get glossed over, silenced, or sometimes deliberately answered incorrectly, in favor of building a story of sleek, seamless, inevitable progress in the tech world. Now, that’s hardly unique to technology — nearly every industry can point to similar issues. But that ahistorical view of the tech world can have serious consequences when today’s tech creators are unable to learn from those who came before them, even if they want to.

5. Most tech education doesn’t include ethical training.

In mature disciplines like law or medicine, we often see centuries of learning incorporated into the professional curriculum, with explicit requirements for ethical education. Now, that hardly stops ethical transgressions from happening—we can see deeply unethical people in positions of power today who went to top business schools that proudly tout their vaunted ethics programs. But that basic level of familiarity with ethical concerns gives those fields a broad fluency in the concepts of ethics so they can have informed conversations. And more importantly, it ensures that those who want to do the right thing and do their jobs in an ethical way have a firm foundation to build on.

But until the very recent backlash against some of the worst excesses of the tech world, there had been little progress in increasing the expectation of ethical education being incorporated into technical training. There are still very few programs aimed at upgrading the ethical knowledge of those who are already in the workforce; continuing education is largely focused on acquiring new technical skills rather than social ones. There’s no silver-bullet solution to this issue; it’s overly simplistic to think that simply bringing computer scientists into closer collaboration with liberal arts majors will significantly address these ethics concerns. But it is clear that technologists will have to rapidly become fluent in ethical concerns if they want to continue to have the widespread public support that they currently enjoy.

6. Tech is often built with surprising ignorance about its users.

Over the last few decades, society has greatly increased in its respect for the tech industry, but this has often resulted in treating the people who create tech as infallible. Tech creators now regularly get treated as authorities in a wide range of fields like media, labor, transportation, infrastructure and political policy — even if they have no background in those areas. But knowing how to make an iPhone app doesn’t mean you understand an industry you’ve never worked in!

The best, most thoughtful tech creators engage deeply and sincerely with the communities that they want to help, to ensure they address actual needs rather than indiscriminately “disrupting” the way established systems work. But sometimes, new technologies run roughshod over these communities, and the people making those technologies have enough financial and social resources that the shortcomings of their approaches don’t keep them from disrupting the balance of an ecosystem. Often times, tech creators have enough money funding them that they don’t even notice the negative effects of the flaws in their designs, especially if they’re isolated from the people affected by those flaws. Making all of this worse are the problems with inclusion in the tech industry, which mean that many of the most vulnerable communities will have little or no representation amongst the teams that create new tech, preventing those teams from being aware of concerns that might be of particular importance to those on the margins.

7. There is never just one single genius creator of technology.

One of the most popular representations of technology innovation in popular culture is the genius in a dorm room or garage, coming up with a breakthrough innovation as a “Eureka!” moment. It feeds the common myth-making around people like Steve Jobs, where one individual gets credit for “inventing the iPhone” when it was the work of thousands of people. In reality, tech is always informed by the insights and values of the community where its creators are based, and nearly every breakthrough moment is preceded by years or decades of others trying to create similar products.

The “lone creator” myth is particularly destructive because it exacerbates the exclusion problems which plague the tech industry overall; those lone geniuses that are portrayed in media are seldom from backgrounds as diverse as people in real communities. While media outlets may benefit from being able to give awards or recognition to individuals, or educational institutions may be motivated to build up the mythology of individuals in order to bask in their reflected glory, the real creation stories are complicated and involve many people. We should be powerfully skeptical of any narratives that indicate otherwise.

8. Most tech isn’t from startups or by startups.

Only about 15% of programmers work at startups, and in many big tech companies, most of the staff aren’t even programmers anyway. So the focus on defining tech by the habits or culture of programmers that work at big-name startups deeply distorts the way that tech is seen in society. Instead, we should consider that the majority of people who create technology work in organizations or institutions that we don’t think of as “tech” at all.
What’s more, there are lots of independent tech companies — little indie shops or mom-and-pop businesses that make websites, apps, or custom software, and a lot of the most talented programmers prefer the culture or challenges of those organizations over the more famous tech titans. We shouldn’t erase the fact that startups are only a tiny part of tech, and we shouldn’t let the extreme culture of many startups distort the way we think about technology overall.

9. Most big tech companies make money in just one of three ways.

It’s important to understand how tech companies make money if you want to understand why tech works the way that it does.

Advertising: Google and Facebook make nearly all of their money from selling information about you to advertisers. Almost every product they create is designed to extract as much information from you as possible, so that it can be used to create a more detailed profile of your behaviors and preferences, and the search results and social feeds made by advertising companies are strongly incentivized to push you toward sites or apps that show you more ads from these platforms. It’s a business model built around surveillance, which is particularly striking since it’s the one that most consumer internet businesses rely upon.

Big Business: Some of the larger (generally more boring) tech companies like Microsoft and Oracle and Salesforce exist to get money from other big companies that need business software but will pay a premium if it’s easy to manage and easy to lock down the ways that employees use it. Very little of this technology is a delight to use, especially because the customers for it are obsessed with controlling and monitoring their workers, but these are some of the most profitable companies in tech.

Individuals: Companies like Apple and Amazon want you to pay them directly for their products, or for the products that others sell in their store. (Although Amazon’s Web Services exist to serve that Big Business market, above.) This is one of the most straightforward business models—you know exactly what you’re getting when you buy an iPhone or a Kindle, or when you subscribe to Spotify, and because it doesn’t rely on advertising or cede purchasing control to your employer, companies with this model tend to be the ones where individual people have the most power.

That’s it. Pretty much every company in tech is trying to do one of those three things, and you can understand why they make their choices by seeing how it connects to these three business models

10. The economic model of big companies skews all of tech.

Today’s biggest tech companies follow a simple formula:

Make an interesting or useful product that transforms a big market

Get lots of money from venture capital investors

Try to quickly grow a huge audience of users even if that means losing a lot of money for a while

Figure out how to turn that huge audience into a business worth enough to give investors an enormous return

This model looks very different than how we think of traditional growth companies, which start off as small businesses and primarily grow through attracting customers who directly pay for goods or services. Companies that follow this new model can grow much larger, much more quickly, than older companies that had to rely on revenue growth from paying customers. But these new companies also have much lower accountability to the markets they’re entering because they’re serving their investors’ short-term interests ahead of their users’ or community’s long-term interests.

The pervasiveness of this kind of business plan can make competition almost impossible for companies without venture capital investment. Regular companies that grow based on earning money from customers can’t afford to lose that much money for that long a time. It’s not a level playing field, which often means that companies are stuck being either little indie efforts or giant monstrous behemoths, with very little in between. The end result looks a lot like the movie industry, where there are tiny indie arthouse films and big superhero blockbusters, and not very much else.

And the biggest cost for these big new tech companies? Hiring coders. They pump the vast majority of their investment money into hiring and retaining the programmers who’ll build their new tech platforms. Precious little of these enormous piles of money are put into things that will serve a community or build equity for anyone other than the founders or investors in the company. There is no aspiration that making a hugely valuable company should also imply creating lots of jobs for lots of different kinds of people.

11. Tech is as much about fashion as function.

To outsiders, creating apps or devices is presented as a hyper-rational process where engineers choose technologies based on which are the most advanced and appropriate to the task. In reality, the choice of things like programming languages or toolkits can be subject to the whims of particular coders or managers, or to whatever’s simply in fashion. Just as often, the process or methodology by which tech is created can follow fads or trends that are in fashion, affecting everything from how meetings are run to how products are developed.

Sometimes the people creating technology seek novelty, sometimes they want to go back to the staples of their technological wardrobe, but these choices are swayed by social factors in addition to an objective assessment of technical merit. And a more complex technology doesn’t always equal a more valuable end product, so while many companies like to tout how ambitious or cutting-edge their new technologies are, that’s no guarantee that they provide more value for regular users, especially when new technologies inevitably come with new bugs and unexpected side-effects.

12. No institution has the power to rein in tech’s abuses.

In most industries, if companies start doing something wrong or exploiting consumers, they’ll be reined in by journalists who will investigate and criticize their actions. Then, if the abuses continue and become serious enough, the companies can be sanctioned by lawmakers at the local, state, governmental or international level.

Today, though, much of the tech trade press focuses on covering the launch of new products or new versions of existing products, and the tech reporters who do cover the important social impacts of tech are often relegated to being published alongside reviews of new phones, instead of being prominently featured in business or culture coverage. Though this has started to change as tech companies have become absurdly wealthy and powerful, coverage is also still constrained by the culture within media companies. Traditional business reporters often have seniority in major media outlets, but are commonly illiterate in basic tech concepts in a way that would be unthinkable for journalists who cover finance or law. Meanwhile, dedicated tech reporters who may have a better understanding of tech’s impact on culture are often assigned to (or inclined to) cover product announcements instead of broader civic or social concerns.

The problem is far more serious when we consider regulators and elected officials, who often brag about their illiteracy about tech. Having political leaders who can’t even install an app on their smartphones makes it impossible to understand technology well enough to regulate it appropriately, or to assign legal accountability when tech‘s creators violate the law. Even as technology opens up new challenges for society, lawmakers lag tremendously behind the state of the art when creating appropriate laws.

Without the corrective force of journalistic and legislative accountability, tech companies often run as if they’re completely unregulated, and the consequences of that reality usually fall on those outside of tech. Worse, traditional activists who rely on conventional methods such as boycotts or protests often find themselves ineffective due to the indirect business model of giant tech companies, which can rely on advertising or surveillance (“gathering user data”) or venture capital investment to continue operations even if activists are effective in identifying problems.

This lack of systems of accountability is one of the biggest challenges facing tech today.

If we understand these things, we can change tech for the better.

If everything is so complicated, and so many important points about tech aren’t obvious, should we just give up hope? No.

Once we know the forces that shape technology, we can start to drive change. If we know that the biggest cost for the tech giants is attracting and hiring programmers, we can encourage programmers to collectively advocate for ethical and social advances from their employers. If we know that the investors who power big companies respond to potential risks in the market, we can emphasize that their investment risk increases if they bet on companies that act in ways that are bad for society.

If we understand that most in tech mean well, but lack the historic or cultural context to ensure that their impact is as good as their intentions, we can ensure that they get the knowledge they need to prevent harm before it happens.

So many of us who create technology, or who love the ways it empowers us and improves our lives, are struggling with the many negative effects that some of these same technologies are having on society. But perhaps if we start from a set of common principles that help us understand how tech truly works, we can start to tackle technology’s biggest problems.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/04/07/12-things-everyone-should-understand-about-tech/At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible.

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible.

Though the world wide web has been around for more than a quarter century, people have been theorizing about hypertext and linked documents and a global network of apps for at least 75 years, and perhaps longer. And while some of those ideas are now obsolete, or were hopelessly academic as concepts, or seem incredibly obvious in a world where we’re all on the web every day, the time is perfect to revisit a few of the overlooked gems from past eras. Perhaps modern versions of these concepts could be what helps us rebuild the web into something that has the potential, excitement, and openness that got so many of us excited about it in the first place.

[An aside: Our team at Glitch has been hard at work on delivering many of the core ideas discussed in this piece, including new approaches to View Source, Authoring, Embedding, and more. If these ideas resonate with you, we hope you’ll check out Glitch and see how we can bring these abilities back to the web.]

View Source

For the first few years of the web, the fundamental way that people learned to build web pages was by using the “View Source” feature in their web browser. You would point your mouse at a menu that said something like “View Source” (nobody was browsing the web on a touchscreen back then) and suddenly you’d see the HTML code that made up the page you were looking at. If you squinted, you could see the text you’d been reading, and wrapped around it was a fairly comprehensible set of tags — you know, that <p>paragraph</p> kind of stuff.

It was one of the most effective technology teaching tools ever created. And no surprise, since the web was invented for the purpose of sharing knowledge.

These days, View Source is in bad shape. Most mobile devices don’t support the feature at all. And even on the desktop, the feature gets buried away, or hidden unless you enable special developer settings. It’s especially egregious because the tools for working with HTML in a browser are better than ever. Developers have basically given ordinary desktop web browsers the potential to be smart, powerful tools for creating web pages.

But that leads to the other problem. Most complicated web pages these days aren’t actually written by anyone. They’re assembled, by little programs that take the instructions made by a coder, and then translate those instructions into the actual HTML (and CSS, and JavaScript, and images, and everything else) that goes to your browser. If you’re an expert, maybe you can figure out what tools were being used to assemble the page, and go to GitHub and find some version of those tools to try out. But it’s the difference between learning to cook by looking over someone’s shoulder or being told where a restaurant bought its ingredients.

Bringing View Source back could empower a new generation of creators to see the web as something they make, not just a place where big companies put up sites that we all dump our personal data into.

Authoring

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, he assumed that, just like in earlier hypertext systems, every web browser would be able to write web pages just as easily as it read them. In fact, that early belief led many who pioneered the web to assume that the format of HTML itself didn’t matter that much, as many different browsing tools would be able to create it.

In some ways, that’s true — billions of people make things on the web all the time. Only they don’t know they’re making HTML, because Facebook (or Instagram, or whatever other app they’re using) generates it for them.

Interestingly, it’s one of Facebook’s board members that helped cause this schism between reading and writing on the web. Marc Andreessen pioneered the early Mosaic web browser, and then famously went on to spearhead Netscape, the first broadly-available commercial web browser. But Netscape wasn’t made as a publicly-funded research project at a state university — it was a hot startup company backed by a lot of venture capital investment.

It’s no surprise, then, that the ability to create web pages was reserved for Netscape Gold, the paid version of that first broadly consumer-oriented web browser. Reading things on the web would be free, sure. But creating things on the web? We’d pay venture-backed startup tech companies for the ability to do that, and they’d mediate it for us.

Notwithstanding Facebook’s current dominance, there are still a lot of ways to publish actual websites instead of just dumping little bits of content into the giant social network. There are all kinds of “site building” tools that let you pick a template and publish. Professionals have authoring tools or content management systems for maintaining big, serious websites. But these days, there are very few tools you could just use on your computer (or your tablet, or your phone) to create a web page or web site from scratch.

All that could change quickly, though—the barriers are lower than ever to reclaiming the creative capability that the web was supposed to have right from its birth.

Embedding (Transclusion!)

Okay, this one’s nerdy. But I’m just gonna put it out there: You’re supposed to be able to include other websites (or parts of other websites) in your web pages. Sure, we can do some of that — you’ve seen plenty of YouTube videos embedded inside articles that you’ve read, and as media sites pivot to video, that’s only gotten more commonplace.

But you almost never see a little functional part of one website embedded in another. Old-timers might remember when Flash ruled the web, and people made simple games or interactive art pieces that would then get shared on blogs or other media sites. Except for the occasional SoundCloud song on someone’s Tumblr, it’s a grim landscape for anyone that can imagine a web where bits and pieces of different sites are combined together like Legos.

Most of the time, we talk about this functionality as “embedding” a widget from one site into another. There was even a brief fad during the heyday of blogs more than a decade ago where people started entire companies around the idea of making “widgets” that would get shared on blogs or even on company websites. These days that capability is mostly used to put a Google Map onto a company’s site so you can find their nearest location.

Those old hypertext theory people had broader ambitions, though. They thought we might someday be able to pull live, updated pieces of other sites into our own websites, mixing and matching data or even whole apps as needed. This ability to include part of one web page into another was called “transclusion”, and it’s remained a bit of a holy grail for decades.

There’s no reason that this can’t be done today, especially since the way we build web pages in the modern era often involves generating just partial pages or only sending along the data that’s updated on a particular site. If we can address the security and performance concerns of sharing data this way, we could address one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of the web.

Your own website at your own address

This one is so obvious, but we seem to have forgotten all about it: The web was designed so that everybody was supposed to have their own website, at its own address. Of course, things got complicated early on — it was too hard to run your own website (let alone your own web server!) and the relative scarcity of domain names made them expensive and a pain for everybody to buy.
If you just wanted to share some ideas, or talk to your friends, or do your work, managing all that hassle became too much trouble, and pretty soon a big, expensive industry of web consultants sprung up to handle the needs of anybody who still actually wanted their own website—and had the money to pay for it.

But things have gotten much easier. There are plenty of tools for easily building a website now, and many of them are free. And while companies still usually have a website of their own, an individual having a substantial website (not just a one-page placeholder) is pretty unusual these days unless they’re a Social Media Expert or somebody with a book to sell.

There’s no reason it has to be that way, though. There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit. There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff. Yet there’s been a dogged community of web nerds working on that problem for a decade or two, trying to see if they can get the ease or convenience of sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to work across a distributed network where everyone has their own websites.

Now, none of that stuff is simple enough yet. It’s for nerds, or sometimes, it’s for nobody at all. But the same was true of the web itself, for years, when it was young. This time, we know the stakes, and we can imagine the value of having a little piece of the internet that we own ourselves, and have some control over.

It’s not impossible that we could still complete the unfinished business that’s left over from the web’s earliest days. And I have to imagine it’ll be kind of fun and well worth the effort to at least give it a try.

]]>https://anildash.com/2018/03/22/he-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web/I was born and raised outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A few weeks ago, an editor of The Patriot-News, the local paper, asked me for my thoughts regarding the anniversary of the attacks.

To put things in context, I was always very ambivalent about the culture of the area I grew

]]>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/Y9JIVO4dqdM/5a9ba456581f6401162019bcSun, 04 Mar 2018 07:46:30 GMTI was born and raised outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A few weeks ago, an editor of The Patriot-News, the local paper, asked me for my thoughts regarding the anniversary of the attacks.

To put things in context, I was always very ambivalent about the culture of the area I grew up in. Though it’s very geographically beautiful, it is a much more conservative place that I didn’t really begin to appreciate until years after I had left. It is also a simpler place, in many ways, which is why the tone of my editorial is a little more straightforward and literal than my usual cynical and sarcastic self. Not, of course, that they wouldn’t understand my piece, but that the usual tone of my writing wouldn’t really do justice to the ideas I was trying to express.

Or, to put it a different way, I’m a lot more corny and maudlin in this essay, but it’s mostly because one of the things I’ve tried not to do since the attacks is mask actual emotion with the usual ironic distance that I tend to apply to such matters. I’m an idealist at heart, and I’d rather have that show.

Also, the Harrisburg Senators are the AA minor league baseball team, which after a rocky history had shut down in the 1950s, only to be revived in 1987 as part of a revitalization of Harrisburg. The city has flourished since, and I can’t help but think that part of the reason why is because it was so inspiring to watch that team achieve such a tremendous success their very first year out.

This essay appeared with slightly different edits in last Sunday’s Patriot-News.

We Have Our Differences

A month after last September’s attacks, I left Manhattan for the first time. I had holed up a bit, clinging to my adopted city as a bit of a sanctuary, wanting to hold on tightly to a New York that suddenly seemed vulnerable, even fragile. But it was time to venture out, so I found myself en route to Harrisburg, and to the town I was born and raised in.

The thing that struck me, other than the usual contrast of Harrisburg, with its quiet and its slower pace, was the distinction between New York City and Central Pennsylvania’s signs. The marquees in front of restaurants and car dealerships and churches had all sprouted similar reassurances of “United We Stand” or “God Bless America”, in a singularity of message that I hadn’t seen since my days as a teenager in the area, when the success of any local sports team would prompt all of the signs to show a similar unity.

That driving down the street would evoke memories of rooting for the home team when I was younger probably wasn’t coincidence. As a self-described member of the New York liberal media, and a man who is the son of first-generation immigrants, I was never unaware on my visits to my hometown that there were some who felt I was somehow less American than they were. Add in that I probably physically look a little more like the hijackers of last September than most people’s mental image of the boy next door, and suddenly what seemed uncomfortable or unusual might now be construed as downright Unamerican. But my identity as an American was forged by my experiences growing up in these small towns.

And in those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

It was no accident that the primary target, the location deemed most threatening and offensive to those who would resent American culture, is the place where we embrace the widest variety of people. Where what it is to be American is at its most inclusive, and it becomes clear that American is not something that one does, but rather something that one is. Among those lost in the collapse of the Twin Towers were citizens of at least 42 countries. To have lost people from so many countries around the world is part of what makes those events a particularly American tragedy.

I realized shortly after the attacks that, while flying, or when crossing one of the bridges or tunnels into Manhattan, or even just in going about the course of my daily life, I might have to show not just that I had no ill intent, but that I might need to prove my “American-ness”. A photo ID or a knowledge of American customs wouldn’t be enough, now that those murderers had tainted those formerly unblemished credentials.

What came to mind on the times when I wondered about proving myself as an American were the images of my youth spent in Central Pennsylvania. I started to carry around in my wallet some ticket stubs from one magical summer when I was in junior high school, when the then brand-new Harrisburg Senators went from being nonexistent to being Eastern League champs. The proof of my loyalty was my history in Harrisburg, not because I had gone to a few baseball games, but because being American is part of who I am. Anyone can come to our country and eat a hot dog and watch a ball game and stroll along the riverside, but that won’t make him an American. Being able to grow up amongst fellow fans, despite not knowing of the history of the Senators who played in the 50’s, being able to bridge small-town boy and big-city man, being able to live both as a personally conservative son of immigrants and a politically liberal citizen of the United States: these were the proud privileges and cherished rights that made me an American.

It’s a lesson not easily learned. I’ve seen the eye-rolling as politicians and opportunists on both sides of the political spectrum try to use the World Trade Center attacks as justification for whatever plans or programs they’ve always been convinced should be foisted upon the public. I’ve seen the grimaces and groans as challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance were mounted. I’ve seen good people with unpopular views labelled as disloyal, untrustworthy, even treasonous. So it bears repeating that being an American isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you are.

The lesson I’ve learned is to extend the embrace to all the members of our American family. Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city. I’ll be the first to admit that every time I return to New York City from a visit to Harrisburg, I look around at all my fellow New Yorkers and wonder for a moment if they’re all just a little bit crazy. And, of course, they are. Or at least they’re a little bit different.